


A Promise

by toujourspret (beaubete)



Category: Code Geass
Genre: Age Play, Fix-It of Sorts, M/M, Size Difference
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-04-23 00:35:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19140052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beaubete/pseuds/toujourspret
Summary: It's about time.  A fix-it fic, kind of.  Spoilers for Fukkatsu/Re;surrection.





	A Promise

**Author's Note:**

> So this one started as that quote from the movie _Dazed and Confused_ : "That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I keep getting older and they stay the same age." Obviously it became a bit more than that.
> 
> This fic takes the conceit that Suzaku's Live! geass is keeping him from aging at a normal rate. There are references to character death in this one, and the LL/CC is only really a few offhand comments.

“If I have to spend another minute with her, I’m going to be the first person to figure out how to hold two Codes at once.”  Lelouch is snarly, aggravated; he’s picked up bad habits from CC, for all that he’s complaining at Suzaku about her. Suzaku, who’s still standing, startled, by the front door.  Suzaku, who hasn’t seen him in forty-five years.

Lelouch is still grumbing under his breath as he slams the door behind himself, gesturing wildly along with whatever he’s muttering, even as he pushes past Suzaku and into his—well.  Not home. These are lonely little rooms he keeps by himself, small by design and by his request. He’d have a harder time if the walls he’s bouncing off of were further apart. Suzaku watches, bemused, as Lelouch throws himself onto the sofa in the little living room where he’d been watching terrible Britannian television in the hopes that it might put him to sleep.  He’s flung one overdramatic arm across his eyes and is stretched out to cover the whole seat, and suddenly, viscerally, Suzaku is seventeen again and watching his best friend flounce around the rooms he and Nunnally had shared at Ashford.

Suzaku swallows hard.

It’s sharper than he’d have thought to see him, so young and familiar when Nunnally’s—when Nunnally—

Lelouch turns over, and his eyes are somber, his body shifted to somehow take up more space and less.  “I know,” he murmurs, and it’s the first moment Suzaku realizes he’s said something. “I—”

“What, too busy?” Suzaku asks, because once, he’d have thought only death would stop Lelouch from being where Nunnally needed him—but instead, Lelouch bows his head.  Looks away. There’s guilt on every single inch of his face, and for a moment longer than he’d like to admit, it makes Suzaku glad. There’s always been something about Lelouch that brings Suzaku’s emotions to the surface, makes his fists ball and his heart hurt and his jaw clench.  “It was your only chance,” he snaps, and Lelouch’s flinch at that is. It’s satisfying, watching the dart strike home. He doesn’t even fight it, just lets Suzaku throw the words at him. “Your only chance! Did you think about that, that they’d put her somewhere you couldn’t get to?  That you’d never—”

“Enough.”   

“—that she’s  _ buried— _ ”

“Enough!”  There’s no mistaking the cry as anything but a plea.  “Please, I didn’t come here to fight. I didn’t.”

“You came here because you were sick of CC.”

A pause.  “Yes. I—yes, I did.  But I wanted to see you.”

“You left Nunnally—” and it’s a desperate grab, thin and flimsy enough to see the bones of his jealousy through.  ‘You left me,’ he’s saying, clear enough that Lelouch’s eyes soften, the arrogant turn of his chin dips. 

“I couldn’t.  I couldn’t see her that way.  De—oh god.” Lelouch sounds vaguely nauseated at the thought.  “I thought—”

Suzaku waits.  Watches as Lelouch’s shoulders shake; it’s always been the worst thing for him: confessions, admissions.  Apologies. Lelouch has never been able to say he was wrong. Suzaku’s going to make him.

“I thought.”  The words are firm, steady, and still Lelouch cuts himself off, looks away.  Flushes, just a little, and for a moment looks more like an eighteen year old boy than the demon emperor he was, than the immortal creature he’s become.  Suzaku suddenly feels every minute of his age. “I thought you’d look older.” It’s a pathetic save, an attempt at ducking, and Suzaku doesn’t have the heart not to play along.

“I’m about twenty eight, physically.  Give or take.”

The air hisses out of Lelouch’s lungs like a deflated tire.  Twenty eight, when he should be more than sixty. Twenty eight, when their friends from school are greying, grandparents.  The ones who made it through. Lelouch’s eyes dart up to see, to decide how Suzaku means it— _ Live! _ ; it hangs in the air between them, silent and deafening.  “Twenty eight,” Lelouch repeats slowly. Then, “Do you—” He doesn’t finish it.  Whatever he was about to say puts a rueful smile on his lips, and he shakes his head.  “I’m glad. It’s selfish to say it, but I’m glad.”

Because he’d been a child when he placed this promise on him, because they’d both been children playing war games.  Because the one thing Lelouch can’t stand is being lonely, and that’s why he’s always surrounded himself with bright, happy people.  It’s why he protected the world, in his own way. Suzaku’s fingers curl, then uncurl at his sides. “It doesn’t matter to me that you’re glad.  At all.”

Lelouch has the grace to nod at that, tipping his chin against his chest for a moment before he reaches over, snagging the remote.  Already he’s shaking himself off, tucking away the messy emotions and locking the thin wisps of humanity away inside himself. When he turns back, his gaze is luminous purple, so like CC that Suzaku flinches at it.  “Come join me. I’ll stay the night and go in the morning.”

And.  

Because Lelouch is the first person to enter these rooms since Nunnally’s death three years ago.  Because Lelouch is sitting in the space that’s been ringing hollow for long enough that the emptiness  resonates inside his chest. Because Lelouch is Lelouch, and that’s always been enough—he catches Lelouch’s sleeve between his fingertips.  “You don’t have to go.”

Lelouch’s smile is small, but real.

The show is terrible, truly, but Lelouch leans against his arm as they watch it, and the show after it, and when the shows finally turn to the kinds of ads that come with being awake well past even the latest night owl, it’s easy enough to turn the television off, to stand and stretch.  Lelouch peers up at him. He isn’t any taller—Suzaku’s stayed short—but his shoulders are wider, his hips and waist still fashionably narrow but his limbs thicker. The curious gaze makes Suzaku blush, and he turns away, just a little bit.

“Did you have—” Lelouch pauses, clearly tasting the word he’s going to try before just as clearly giving up, “plans for tomorrow?”  Work, he means—is Zero expected anywhere, he’s asking. Suzaku shakes his head.

Laughs.  “I was going to fake my own death tomorrow,” he says, half because it’s been on his mind—he’s done it twice now, once to kill Kururugi Suzaku and once to kill the Zero who’d ended the demon emperor’s terrible reign; it’s nearly time to do it again.  He’s been to his own funeral twice—and half because he’s still feeling a little mean. “Tips?”

Lelouch purses his lips like he’s annoyed, but just as quickly he slides back into the fond amusement he’s worn since Suzaku joined him on the sofa.  “You did it first anyway,” he says instead, and it’s true. Suzaku nods. Laughs, too.

He can hear Lelouch’s footsteps behind him as he trails into the bedroom.  Like the rest of the place, the room is small, but the bed itself is a conceit he let Nunnally insist on when she created this space for him.  It’s smaller than Lelouch’s own bed in the Imperial palace, but Suzaku’s had whole apartments smaller than that; it’ll be big enough for both of them, at least, and he hears the sound of Lelouch undressing behind him.  He doesn’t look.

“Your boots must be heavy,” he says instead, because it’s safer.  Lelouch’s laugh at that is light. “You want something to sleep in?”

It’s.  He can hear Lelouch thinking, can hear the choices on the tip of his tongue and taste his own.  “Yeah.” It’s soft. Vague. His eye catches on the flat plane of pale skin, on the jagged, angry red of a scar stretched from the end of one collarbone to the other. But he doesn’t let himself look, not really, as he tosses a tee shirt from the drawer.  Lelouch catches it in one hand, smoother than Suzaku’d expected, and he suddenly misses that awkward, lazy boy with an intensity that burns. “Thanks.”

For himself, he simply shucks out of the sweater he’d thrown on over his night clothes.  He’s been ready for sleep for hours, unable at first and then unwilling. The mattress cups him dearly when he lies down; a moment later, the other side dips, too.

“Suzaku.”  Lelouch’s whisper is soft, barely more than a breath.  Suzaku shifts and then Lelouch’s hand is touching his, sneaking in to press their palms together and lock their fingers.  Lelouch’s hand has never felt small before, or frail, but he squeezes against Suzaku’s hand and Suzaku freezes, terrified that he’ll break it somehow.  Lelouch lays his head along Suzaku’s shoulder.

“You didn’t let me say goodbye,” Suzaku explains around the stone that’s pressing his throat closed.  Lelouch nods against him. “You just. I woke up thinking we’d have another day, another conversation, another chance, but you just.”

“—left,” Lelouch agrees.  “I did.”

“Why?!”  Suzaku’s heart folds around the word.  It’s more than he’s ever wanted to say, less than he needs to.  Lelouch is quiet as he blinks back against the sudden tears stinging in the corners of his eyes.  It isn’t fair, Suzaku thinks fiercely, that this can happen, that he can feel so young and foolish at his age, that Lelouch can be quiet, can hold himself in so tightly while Suzaku spills messy between them.  “Why?”

Lelouch’s thumb rubs at the back of his hand, idle, distracted.  And then; “I’m never going to die. Not—never. And you are. Next year or a hundred from now.  And Nunnally has. I.”

It makes a certain sense, cruel that it is—trust Lelouch to deprive himself of something in order to brace against losing it.  He isn’t as angry as he might be; it had hurt terribly to lay his little sister in her marble vault. “Not ever,” Lelouch repeats, and Suzaku wonders if it is LL or CC he’s hearing.

“I’ve never—” he starts, but what?  What can he say here? ‘Forgiven you’? ‘Truly lived’? ‘Gotten over you’?  Yes, and yes, and yes. “I know how cruel time is,” he says instead.

Lelouch squeezes his hand.  “I know.” His mouth sounds wet in the dark; Suzaku turns to peer at him, but all he can see of Lelouch is and outline.  Without light, his features paint in in broad strokes: the hollows of his eyes, the line of his nose. His lips. The lamp’s light is soft between them when he flips it on.

‘Join me,’ Lelouch had said, and he does now, tipping his chin up to meet him as Lelouch leans down.  It’s sweet, fleeting, everything that a kiss between them could never have been before. Not really, with so many other things already there.  Lelouch’s lips move against his in a slow glide, and when he draws away, Suzaku follows. He’s humoring him, letting Suzaku steal kisses and chase behind until Suzaku catches him, teeth against the inside of Lelouch’s lower lip.  It isn’t—it’s not supposed to be mean, not until Lelouch presses the tip of his tongue to Suzaku’s own upper lip and he gasps, startled back against the pillows. Above him, Lelouch looks smug. Suzaku supposes he has a lot to look smug about, anyway.

In his palms, Lelouch seems to thaw, lets himself be tugged down until his palms are flat on Suzaku’s chest and his hair is in Suzaku’s eyes.  It’s.

And if he’s honest, he’s dreamed this before, over the long years, dreamed Lelouch in his arms and beneath his hands and in his bed.  He’s lain on these very sheets with the pillowcase between his teeth and his palm hot and sweating around his cock and he’s imagined the things he’d do in this moment.  The cool words he’d murmur, the taste of Lelouch’s throat against his tongue. In the end, it’s embarrassing: he wells up until the tears begin to leak out in fat drops against his cheeks.  Lelouch’s eyes go wide.

“Suzaku—”

“Do you know, I always thought I’d be better at this, if you gave me the chance.  I thought,” Suzaku says, but. It’s embarrassing, telling his friend that he’d hoped, stupidly, on his own, for decades.  Hoped. Longed for. A cloud passes behind Lelouch’s eyes, and he blinks.

“Thought?”

“It’s unkind of you to ask,” Suzaku tells him, and Lelouch nods, abashed.  But Lelouch has never had a problem with being cruel before; he traces his fingertips along the edge of Suzaku’s shirt where it’s ridden up.  His thighs are very pale against the bedsheets.

“There’s something about you that makes me want to be mean to you,” and as an admission, it explains a lot about their lives.  He can’t help smiling, and Lelouch meets it with a tentative one of his own. For all the way his skin glows white in the thin light from the window, Lelouch’s thigh is warm, hot, beneath Suzaku’s hand.  Lelouch shifts; his lips part.

“You and CC—?” he has to ask.

“Yes.”  It isn’t surprising.  They’ve traveled together now several times as long as he’s known him.  “You and Euphie?” Ah. That part is surprising.

“No.”

“No?”  But Lelouch squirms under his gaze, just a little bit, and blows a long breath through his teeth, lancing an infection held under the skin for longer than Suzaku’s noticed.  How long has Lelouch let this fester? How long—? His fingers tighten around the curve of Lelouch’s leg and Lelouch’s mouth falls open again—sighs. They’re sighs, small and silent, and Suzaku lets the one that’s been gathering in his chest go.  Lelouch turns to him, and when he does, Suzaku catches his jaw in the cup of a palm.

“No.”

It’s enough for Lelouch, apparently, that he didn’t sleep with his sister, enough to forget the chilly poise that’s always been so important to him.  Enough to drip into Suzaku’s embrace with his eyes, with his heart, with his mouth, with his arms open; there’s hunger in his kiss now, and the experience that shows when he rubs his body against Suzaku’s—for Suzaku, it’s been decades spent in castigation; for Lelouch, it’s been decades learning.  He doesn’t reach for breasts that aren’t there, thankfully, but he doesn’t seem to know quite what to do with the cock that fits in neatly beside his own, with the weight of Suzaku’s hands against his shoulder, around the shell of his skull. 

“Small,” Suzaku murmurs.  In his arms, Lelouch bristles like a cat, but it isn’t—that’s not what he means, not really.  His hands curl in the warm silk of Lelouch’s hair, span the breadth of his back, the fine arch of his prominent spine pressing into his palm.  “Was I ever so small? I don’t remember it.”

And if he keeps going, he knows Lelouch will fight before listening; he gathers both thin wrists in one hand and gently tugs them over Lelouch’s head to press him into the pillow.  Lelouch’s eyes are defiant, but he arches into it when Suzaku leans in to suck a dark mark along the line of his neck. When he’s satisfied that it’s dark enough, he sits back on his heels to watch Lelouch remember he’s still pinned.

He doesn’t disappoint.  The struggling doesn’t last long—Lelouch has never been strong, and Suzaku’s got the benefit of ten years’ weight on him—but it’s still quicker than he’s expected, and the sharp line of pink that’s traced itself over Lelouch’s cheeks is shocking.  Suzaku leans back again to take it in; the tee shirt is riding up, rucked around Lelouch’s hips precariously. The blush spreads.

“Are you just going to stare and make creepy comments?”

It isn’t as forceful as Lelouch probably means it, and Suzaku’s laugh curls warm and dark in his belly.  Lelouch’s blush spreads further. “Maybe,” Suzaku murmurs into Lelouch’s ear, the soft puff of his breath just enough to disturb the soft hair.  Lelouch twitches in his grip. “What would you do if I did?”

“Nothing.”  Lelouch is breathless, groaning, captured.  “I can’t; you’re too—”

Big.  The word hangs between them unspoken.  Suzaku feels his mouth turn up in a smile that makes Lelouch go still.  He gasps again, a plea for air, and Suzaku leans in to take it back again.  

This time their kisses are hot, hot enough to kindle sparks between them as Lelouch sobs for breath before Suzaku sucks it back again.  He leaves up just as Lelouch begins to go faint beneath him, clearly swimmy and panting. Instead, he just watches until Lelouch is tired of his gaze and bucks, forcing his mouth along Suzaku’s until he’s sliding down his chin, into the hollow behind his ear, and oh, the whimpers Suzaku hears then.  He stills, listening as Lelouch works himself against his abdomen and  _ cries _ for it.

And doesn’t he deserve a reward for it?  Suzaku wraps a palm around one skinny hip to slow the rocking, to coax him into a slower, more deliberate grind.  He wraps his lips around the lobe of one ear, flicks at it with his tongue, and Lelouch makes a sharp sound against him.  He presses up against Suzaku’s hand, but he’s careful—so careful—not to break the grip. Suzaku smiles again, and this time he’s sure it’s all teeth.

“I want to suck your cock,” Suzaku tells him, despite the fact that he hasn’t, with anyone, not in years.  Lelouch won’t care—may not even know, from the way his eyes squinch up like he’s in pain. His nod is frantic.

The last time he’s done this—it doesn’t matter, not really, not when he’s tangled his fingers in the center of the shirt he’s loaned Lelouch and is slowly twisting them tight to reveal him.  There’s a spot, dark and tempting, along the hem; when the fabric catches, Suzaku’s too busy watching the hungry, desperate look on Lelouch’s face to see the way his cock bounces, tugged rigid by the soft material.  No, he knows from the weight of it as it lands against his thigh, from the dizzy look on Lelouch’s face. By the time he makes it down to where he’s dripping, Lelouch is fragrant, swimming pools and copper and come. Suzaku nudges his face along the side of his cock and breathes.

“God.”  It’s more than he should say, maybe more than Lelouch’s starry, dazy eyes can understand, but.  “If I were still eighteen, I’d fuck you until you cried.”

“If you were still eighteen,” Lelouch replies, thready and reluctant, “you wouldn’t want to.”

“If you ever thought that, you weren’t as smart as I thought you were.”  It’s surprisingly tender; for a moment, Lelouch forgets that he’s supposed to be pinned and his fingers trail through the hair at Suzaku’s crown, tracing down to his ear.  It’s fond.

But he’s still gorgeous, hard and musky and ready when Suzaku strokes the tip of his finger down the line of his cock; Lelouch arches, hands going back above his head obediently.  Suzaku rewards him with a kiss, firm and sweet, right at the base of his cock where it joins his body. The sound he makes at that will haunt Suzaku’s favorite dreams.

The slip of the skin against his tongue is lovely, and when he draws back to lave at the head, the whole thing’s gone red, flushed pretty and swollen stiff.  Up the length of his body, Lelouch’s face is wet, sweat and spit and tears of excitement, and his lashes flutter when Suzaku presses him to his stomach to explore with the sharp tip of his tongue.  Lelouch’s thighs are shaking as he curls like a shrimp around Suzaku as he loves him with his mouth.

He looks like a teenager.  Suzaku’s hands are big, wide and long against the delicate skin at the backs of his thighs as he scoops Lelouch up, manipulates his body until he’s resting on his shoulders, wrists still crossed above his head even as his fingers knot in the pillowcase.  His heel slips from where Suzaku’s put it on his shoulder, and the sound he makes—that breathy, broken gasp—when Suzaku turns to bite a purple bruise into the white of his inner thigh is shattered. Lelouch is shattered. He’s been reduced to panting and soft crying sounds; he comes abruptly as Suzaku’s exploring the soft skin with his teeth, shooting streaks across his stomach, hard enough that it’s on his neck and in his hair, and in Suzaku’s too.  He gets pitchy when Suzaku holds him down with a firm hand to the chest and licks it from the end of his still-shaking cock.

“You liked it,” Suzaku tells him, or tells his twitching stomach, lips pressed into the skin as he breathes in the taste of Lelouch’s sweat.

“Of course I did.  You were sucking me off.”  Lelouch spent is Lelouch unable to be catty; it comes across sincere, a little awed.  Suzaku turns to look at him, digging his chin into Lelouch’s stomach. Lelouch squirms.

“You wanna—?” Suzaku asks, because Lelouch could say no here and Suzaku would be perfectly content to lap the salt chemical taste of him from his lips and slide his hand inside the sleep pants that were looser before they started.  He won’t, though—lazy as he is, Lelouch’s eyes flare at the question.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

He could run.  Instead, slender fingers walk down his arm to settle around him in a close, steady tugs; Lelouch pulls at his cock with the surety of someone who’s handled his own, and heat steals over Suzaku at the thought of Lelouch biting his knuckles, hand furtive between his thighs.  Somehow it’s easier to imagine now with the distance between their bodies, sweeter to see this high schooler in his bed and imagine him touching himself furtively. Suzaku shakes his head, flushing. He really is a dirty old man.

It isn’t until he’s bumped against the back of Lelouch’s thigh that he realizes where he’s aiming, and by then it’s too late—the tip of his cock slips against Lelouch’s skin suspiciously slick.  Lust crashes into him like a train, sweeping him past the hesitation that he knows he should have and the reservations he knows he should be voicing; he seats himself at Lelouch’s direction, and Lelouch is already at half mast again, already perking up just at the trembling of Suzaku’s thighs as he holds himself back.  Lelouch is. He’s thin, and he’s pretty, and he’s delicate. He’s.

“Small.”  It escapes him and he grabs at it with both hands, but it’s gone, Lelouch’s smile wry beneath him, where he has his cock buried in a teenager.  “Oh god.”

And.  Lelouch sighs when he pulls out, just a bit.  It’s this side of slick enough, and he fumbles until he’s yanked the bedside drawer open.  The bottle is missing, until he finds it tucked in the bay of one narrow, pale hip and laughs to himself—suspiciously slick, indeed.  He oozes more over the red, slightly raw-looking edge of their bodies and hums, spreads the stuff with his fingertips and finds himself rubbing at the thin, stretched skin of Lelouch’s ass.  When he pushes in again, Lelouch’s surprised little moan goes full and throaty.

The next thrust is easier.  The one after easier still. They get easier and faster until he’s flying, his head spinning as he fucks Lelouch into the bed.  Their bodies are smacking with lube, sticky, rude sounds filling the air between the sounds they’re making. Lelouch grunts each time Suzaku hits home, and when Suzaku guides his hips into a new angle, stuffing a pillow beneath him, his sounds go hungry, desperate, tipping up into a whine that stretches into a wail as Suzaku nips just below the scar that stretches across his pale chest.  His nipples are pink, peaked, and Suzaku bites at them, too, all teeth and tongue and longing as he tries to devour him.

It’s the bump of knuckles against his abdomen that makes him aware: Lelouch’s eyes and mouth are wet and open, expression blown as he pulls himself to Suzaku’s eager thrusts.  He’s—there’s precome coating his fingers where they’re wrapped around himself, his earlier pleasure already drying and flaking off with vigorous movement. He’s. Suzaku groans and his pace gets hard, slow, deep thrusts that distract Lelouch from his cock long enough for Suzaku to gather his wrists again; before they’ve even hit the pillow again, Lelouch is coming again, body squeezing at Suzaku in waving pulses.  He’s quiet this time, mouth working for air again as his body goes red and hot in a streak down his chest and his cock lurches, spitting less distance but no less messy. His whole body trembles beneath him as he continues.

“Mmm.”  The purr would be post-coital for anyone else, satisfied and smug.  Lelouch slips a narrow wrist from his grasp to curl it around the back of Suzaku’s head; Suzaku lets him guide him in for a kiss, warm and slick and lovely.  Lelouch devours his sounds, encourages him with little jolts of his hips, even though he looks tired and oversensitive, and when Suzaku comes, it’s with a breath that’s stolen from his lips.  It’s enough to leave him spinning, and he buries his face in the sweaty skin at the curve of his neck, shuddering through the aftershocks. 

When he can pull back, he eases out carefully, but it’s easier—yes, he’d come inside, but it’s less resistance than he’d imagined—his stomach jumps at remembered fantasies, and something of it must show on his face, because Lelouch laughs.

“Pegging.”  And perhaps Suzaku isn’t as indifferent to his sex with CC as he’d thought, because the thought of Lelouch draped over the arm of a sofa—Lelouch laughs again.

They’re disgusting.  Lelouch has caught the worst of it, streaked in come and sweat and faintly pongy of good sex, but Suzaku’s smeared most of the same along his own chest.  The room will need airing; for now, he buries his nose into the fine hair at the nape of Lelouch’s neck and inhales, storing the memory. Another fifty years without him won’t feel as lonely if he locks him in his memory—or perhaps it’ll feel lonelier, and Suzaku’s heart clenches.  Now that he’s had what he’s wanted for so long, perhaps he’ll feel lonelier. Lelouch holds him close.

“I’m sorry.  I am.” And when he shifts like he’s going to leave, sliding off the side of the bed, Suzaku makes a sound he’s not ashamed of, curling his arms tighter.  It’s too soon—! But Lelouch touches his head again, traces that same path through his hair. “I’m not—where’s your shower? I smell.”

Oh.  Suzaku’s cheeks go red, as if embarrassment was possible after fucking his childhood friend in the lonely bed where he’d only dreamed of it.  His arms loosen and he expects Lelouch to step away; always contrary, he presses a kiss to Suzaku’s hair instead, curls his fingers around one of his hands.  “Is it big enough? Join me.”

He’s left an impressive array of marks that darken in the shower’s heat.  He traces them all with wondering fingertips, tastes the water in the curve of his collarbone, scratches his nails through Lelouch’s hair to foam the shampoo.  Lelouch lets him kiss him until the spray goes cold and laughs when he’s left to finish up in the icy spray because he was too focused on love to clean up.

By the time he’s done, Lelouch is curled sleepy in the remade bed; he’s never moved the linens from where Nunnally had put them, so he’s not surprised that he found them.  He smells damp and fresh when Suzaku tucks in behind him.

It isn’t—he doesn’t want sex again, probably couldn’t even get it up if he were to try, but Lelouch’s skin is soft and so warm beneath his fingertips.  He can’t help but marvel, and the petting gentles Lelouch until he’s pliant beside him.

“You touch me like you’re never going to get the chance again.”  It’s quiet, layered with something Suzaku can’t define. It isn’t wrong.  He replies with a kiss to the bottom of the ear. “Suzaku—”

“Don’t.  Don’t make promises,” Suzaku says, because they’re the only words that he can.  His heart would break for sure to wait for years for someone who’s lost track of time to remember he exists.  But is it better or worse than never seeing him again? He doesn’t know.

Lelouch is quiet.  Then—“You could come with me.  With us,” he amends. With Lelouch and his witch, watch them fuck and never age while he falls to pieces.  “I love you, Suzaku. That has to mean something.”

It does.  Suzaku’s chest swells; his face is wet when he presses his brow into the line of Lelouch’s shoulder blade.  “I love you. I missed you. Terribly.”

“Come with us.”  The words are soft, powerful.  A geass, though one not bound through magic.  He nods against him and Lelouch shakes with breath.

“Yes.  Okay, yes.”

There isn’t much to pack.  Zero’s suite is impersonal, or Suzaku’s left it that way.  He takes the pictures. The stories are still breaking when he boards the train—Zero, dead at the hands of terrorists; he’d been getting old, hadn’t he? Nunnally’s grandson posits to the camera, and finally met an enemy who overwhelmed him.  In his honor, the position will go unfilled—and don’t we live in a time where a symbol like Zero, who has done so much for his family and his grandmother and Britannia, where it isn’t necessary? He remembers a meeting with the dead man tenderly, a child at his grandmother’s knee; Zero had seemed so serious, so sad.  Lonely. Had told him there was nothing more important than protecting them, and how now, with his wife and children, he understands how cruel it was. Suzaku watches the announcement and remembers that boy with his sticky, grubby face. Twenty years is both a long time and no time at all.

They meet CC at the station; with fresh eyes, she’s both older and younger than he remembers.  She’s in her early twenties—she’s hundreds of years old. Her eyes trace his features, unhidden because the version of him with a face has been dead nearly half a century, would be aged and grey besides, and the edges of her lip curl up.

“Finally.  It’s about time.”


End file.
